My friends and I never thought this day would come. The daily routines of over 170 million Americans could have been disrupted by a nationwide TikTok ban. On the bright side, my homework will get done a lot quicker.
Every day, I get home from school around 3:30 p.m., with a list of assignments that, if I’m focused, should take until 6 to complete. But I don’t usually end up finishing them until 11. Why? TikTok. It all starts at 3:45, when I typically flop down on my bed and open the app for “just a minute.” But by the time I get up from bed, that “minute” has swelled into several hours. At the moment I am writing this, I could instead distract myself by looking at an orange Muppet-like monster detailing an outlandish and embarrassing story from a non-puppet person’s life. I’ll “like” one video, comment on another and keep my thumb moving. I open the comments on each to laugh and commiserate with others; oftentimes, the harmony in our responses creates the illusion of community — even though we are each very much alone with our phones. I love TikTok so much that I cannot imagine a life without it. And yet I desperately need a life without it.
This app has infiltrated American culture. The national TikTok ban, which entered into force on Sunday, was ruled constitutional by the Supreme Court on Friday. Now, the Google and Apple app stores will be penalized for carrying it and the app has gone dark. President Biden has indicated he will leave enforcement of the ban up to the incoming administration. It still remains to be seen whether President-elect Donald Trump will be able to halt the prohibition once he takes office.
Given my love of TikTok, you might think the notion of losing it would horrify me, and yet, it fills me with hope. You see, I’m a 17-year-old TikTok junkie, and I wholeheartedly support a law that would sever me forever from my fix. My support for this ban has nothing to do with national security. I don’t know whether my name, email address and phone number are stored in Washington, Texas or China. Perhaps I should care more about that, but what worries me most right now is the future of my generation.
This app defines people my age, dictates our conversations, chooses our outfits, and determines what we buy. Last year, TikTok directed me to wear cheetah prints: Suddenly, those animal likenesses ran all my other clothes out of the apartment. Then, it was low-rise jeans only: One morning, I woke up to discover that the feed had been invaded by stylish girls — like the teenage influencer Demetra — wearing denim that shows off midriffs and flares out at the bottom. To finish off the look, social media mandated a slicked-back bun. Nothing screams “clean girl aesthetic” like this hairstyle. (And “clean girl aesthetic” is something I learned on TikTok as well).
Almost every dinner and lunch out starts with whatever is viral on TikTok. The app is my generation’s search engine. “Where should we go for sushi?” “I don’t know. Look it up on TikTok.”
Should TikTok permanently end, we teenagers won’t just lose an app full of funny dances or silly memes; we will surrender a way of being, a fundamental cornerstone of youth culture. But that’s precisely why we need to give it up. This app has pervaded every corner of our consciousness.
According to some estimates, more than half of the weekly active TikTok users are between the ages of 18 and 34, and the average young adult spends more than an hour a day on the app, with some topping two hours. (I’m proud when my daily average clocks in under an hour.) If it seems TikTok knows exactly what we want to see, it’s because it does. The algorithm keeps roughly half of America — and a substantial portion of its young adult population — hooked. We teenagers can’t stop following.
And sometimes what we see isn’t what we want to see at all. The algorithm knows who we want to be and what we want to look like, and it gives us more of the same. In these videos, we come face to face with our most fundamental insecurities and yearning to be accepted. Perfect people lip sync our favorite songs 24 hours a day. Popular people show us the parties that we’re missing. Our friends post about hanging out without us. The algorithm picks at our self-esteem, and it becomes a scab that just won’t heal. How can we look away?
My father recently told me about a famous public service commercial from the ’80s showing a sizzling egg in a frying pan and comparing the egg to a brain on drugs. With TikTok, I can’t help but wonder about what our brains might have done with all the time we’ve dedicated to staring at our screens. Our sleep, our waking hours and our thoughts are surrendered to content creators collecting dimes off our time — and to the coffers of ByteDance itself.
All of my inside jokes with my friends come from whatever’s trending on TikTok. Recently, we laughed about memes involving Lily-Rose Depp and the phrase “Trench coat buttoned to the top.” My vocabulary is also modeled on everyone else’s. One person alone deleting TikTok doesn’t do much; everyone around us still uses it. (I’ve tried deleting it myself, and I end up downloading it again soon enough.)
But an all-out ban could do the trick. Eggs cannot uncook, but our brains could heal from the damage inflicted if we collectively stop using TikTok.
The post I’m a 17-Year-Old TikTok Junkie. I Need This Ban. appeared first on New York Times.
